Hitler's Forgotten Children (2 page)

Older children newly listed in Categories 3 or 4 were shipped off to re-education camps across Bavaria in the heartland of Nazi Germany. The best of the younger ones in the top two categories would – in time – be handed over to a secretive project run by the Reichsführer himself. Its name was Lebensborn and among the infants assigned to its care was nine-month-old Erika Matko.

‘It is our will that this state shall endure for a thousand years. We are happy to know that the future is ours entirely!''
A
DOLF
H
ITLER:
T
RIUMPH OF THE
W
ILL
, 1935

A
t 2.40 a.m. on Monday, 7 May 1945, in a small red-brick schoolhouse in the French city of Reims, Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, Chief of the German Armed Forces High Command, signed the unconditional surrender of the Thousand Year Reich. The five terse paragraphs of this act of capitulation handed over Germany and all its inhabitants to the mercy of the four victorious Allied powers – Britain, America, France and Russia – from 11.01 p.m. the following night.

A week earlier, Hitler and most of his inner circle had committed suicide in the bowels of the Berlin Führerbunker. Heinrich Himmler – Hitler's chief henchman and the man in charge of the entire Nazi apparatus of terror – was on the run, disguised in the coarse grey serge of an enlisted soldier and equipped with forged papers proclaiming him to be a humble sergeant.

It was over: six years of ‘total war' in which my country had murdered and plundered its way across Europe. Now we had to live with the peace.

Who were we then, on that May morning? What was Germany – once the begetter of Bach and Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller – in the aftermath of the brutality of the Blitzkrieg, let alone the Final Solution? What would peace look like to the victors and to the vanquished?

A new term was coined to describe our situation in 1945:
Die Stunde Null
. Literally translated, this means ‘zero hour' but for the smouldering remains of Germany – a country of ruins, shame and starvation – it was more accurately ‘Year Zero': both an end and a beginning.

What did it mean to be a German from 11.01 p.m. on Tuesday, 8 May 1945? To the Allies – the new owners of every metre of turf and of every individual life from the Mass in the west to the Memel in the east – it meant subjugation, suspicion and suppression. Never again, said the four occupying powers, would the poisonous twin rivers of German nationalism and militarism be allowed to rise up and flood the continent. Within hours there would be mechanisms and procedures in place to enforce this ideal – systems that, though I was too young to know then, would direct the course of my life.

To Germans, this question of identity meant something different. Something much less philosophical, something that could perhaps be categorised as the three Ps: physical, political and psychological. Of these, the greatest – the most pressing – was undoubtedly the physical.

Germany in May 1945 was a wasteland of blown-up bridges, damaged roads, burned-out tanks. In the dying weeks and months of his Reich, consumed by madness and impotent rage, Hitler had issued orders to create ‘fortress cities'. The Fatherland was to be defended to the last drop of pure German blood and the last brick of German building. There was to be no surrender but, instead, a
Götterdämmerung
of flame and sacrifice to mark the final days of his self-proclaimed Master Race.

The result was less a noble funeral pyre than a thousand-mile-wide bonfire of his vanity. Forced to fight for every inch of territory – and bludgeoned by Allied carpet-bombing – Germany was reduced to a post-apocalyptic desert. Piles of rubble lay where buildings had once
stood: in Berlin alone there were seventy-five million tons of it piled up along and across almost every street. Other German cities suffered equally, obliterated by bombing and house-to-house fighting that damaged or left derelict seventy per cent of their buildings. And everywhere, now hollow and haggard, a once-proud people who had subjugated those they believed to be inferior.

Newsreels and photos (Allied ones, since the German press had been shut down from the moment of surrender) captured previously unimaginable scenes. Clustered around half-destroyed buildings, blown apart so that the remnants of a once normal life were exposed for all to see – a fireplace, shreds of wallpaper, the remains of a toilet – were the living ghosts of women and children. Orphans, refugees, the aged and the wounded: everywhere a dystopian tableau of anonymous bodies lying dead in the street, watched – or more often avoided – by skeletal figures who might well soon join them.

All of Germany, at least in the cities, was picking through debris, creating makeshift shelters, scrounging for food and either hiding from or fearfully fraternising with the victorious occupying armies. Not from choice, but from necessity.

In the last weeks of the war, the country's economy – so long directed by and for the benefit of the Nazi Party – had collapsed as badly as its buildings. Ironically, there was plenty of money, but coins and paper bills were useless: as every available resource was diverted away from the people to the needs of the army, and as explosions ripped up the railway network, preventing what food was harvested from being distributed, there was little or nothing to buy with the now-useless marks.

Nor did Germany's new masters appear to have a coherent idea of what to do with it. Between July and August 1945, the Allied leaders – Churchill (and, later, Attlee), Truman and Stalin – met at Potsdam to plan the future. Unlike the end of the First World War, when Germany was defeated and subjected to severe punishment and reparations but not wiped from the geographical and political map, the decision was taken
that the country would cease to exist once the war ended. In its place would be four separate ‘Occupation Zones', each owned and ruled by one of the war's victors, according to its own principles and plans.

Yet beyond that there had been little concerted thinking about what, practically, would be done with the former German state once Hitler had been defeated. France had favoured breaking the Reich into a series of small independent states while America had considered returning Germany to a pre-industrialised nation focused and dependent on farming. Washington would come to relent, to accept that requiring tens of millions of Germans to live as medieval peasants was unworkable as well as undesirable. But the Allies failed to contemplate how their separate occupations would function, or to address the monumental problem of feeding both a conquered people – a population swelled by more than ten million refugees from the east – and the massive armies imposing the peace.

There was simply not enough food – and without a functioning transport system, what little there was couldn't be moved to the places where it was most needed. Worse, there was a widespread feeling among the occupying armies that the Germans were long overdue a taste of their own medicine: had the Nazi rampage across Europe not deliberately starved villages, cities, entire nations to the point of death?

This, then, was Hitler's true legacy: a nation starving to death; a population reduced to a desperate struggle for survival, subsisting at best on half the calories needed to sustain life. A country not simply beaten and half-destroyed but wiped completely out of existence.

I was three and a half when peace came. A small, quiet and archetypally blonde German child, I lived in Bandekow, a tiny hamlet in the rural heart of the Mecklenburg region, with my mother, grandmother and younger brother Dietmar. Our home was a big farmhouse, half-timbered and characteristic of the region, set in acres of forest. We were, I think, typical both of a particular class of pre-war Germans and, by contrast, of the post-war country at large. On both sides our family
was old, well established and, notwithstanding the wrecked economy, well off.

My mother, Gisela, was the daughter of a shipping line magnate from Hamburg. The Andersens belonged to the old Hanseatic class – the patrician and prestigious ruling elite which had made its money and its name from trade since Hamburg was declared a free city by the 1815 Congress of Vienna.

Our house in Bandekow had been in my mother's family for generations: it belonged to my great uncle, but had almost certainly been used as a country retreat in the years before 1945. Certainly, the Andersens kept their main residence in Hamburg itself and my grandfather remained there, with my grandmother dividing her time between the two homes.

Gisela was one of four Andersen children. Her brother had been killed, serving in the Wehrmacht in the last days of the war; her eldest sister was estranged – the result of some unspoken act of dishonesty that tarnished the otherwise respectable family name – but her remaining sibling, my Aunt Ingrid (known universally as Erika, or ‘Eka'), was a constant companion in my childhood. At the end of the war, Gisela was thirty-one. She was young, bright – in the brittle and privileged way of her class – and pretty. She was also married, though not, as it turned out, happily.

Hermann von Oelhafen was a career soldier. He had served with honour in the First World War: he was seriously injured in 1914, again in 1915, and, after a final wound in 1917, was awarded the Iron Cross for his pains. Like Gisela, he came from an aristocratic background: both his father and mother could boast the tell-tale ‘von' – the mark of the upper class – in their family names.

But where Gisela was young and lively, Hermann was the complete opposite. He was thirty years older than Gisela and suffered from severe epileptic seizures. Whether these were the cause of his peevish, mean-spirited nature I do not know: what I am certain of is that their
marriage – which took place in 1935, during the first confident years of Hitler's reign – was, by 1945, effectively over. As I grew from a toddler to a young child, I rarely saw my father: we lived in the farmhouse at Bandekow, while Hermann lived 1,000 kilometres away in the Bavarian town of Ansbach.

Perhaps outwardly there was nothing very strange in a married woman living alone with her children and mother. In this our family was typical of the now-dissolved German nation in the immediate months after the war: most adult men – even the very young and the elderly – had been drafted into military service and were now either dead, missing or held in prisoner of war camps across Europe. Germany was a country – more accurately, a former country – of women and children.

But though it played its part, the war was not the prime reason for the separation of my parents. There was an unbridgeable gulf between them; an emotional fracture even less tractable or open to resolution than the divisions imposed upon their nation. I was too young to know it at the time, but it would render my childhood as bleak as the deteriorating political situation in which we found ourselves.

Politics. The second ‘P' which defined life at the end of the war. Not politics as modern generations have come to know and disregard it; not the jockeying for position and power between rival parties in a settled democracy: politics in 1945 was truly red in tooth and claw.

The last days of the war had seen the Allied forces smashing their way through Germany from all points of the compass. American tanks and troops rolled eastward from France, Belgium and Holland; the British fought their way northwards, up through the country from Italy and Austria; and the vast armies of the Soviet Union raced westwards from what had, before the war, been Poland. For each there was an overriding imperative to conquer and control as much German territory as possible: whatever they held when the war finally ended would, under the Potsdam Agreement, become their property with little prospect of subsequent redistribution. In those last weeks of spring 1945, the borders
of post-war Europe were being claimed and, at the same time, the seeds of the Cold War were being planted.

When the fighting was over, it turned out that my father's home was in the American zone: henceforth his fate would depend on the way Washington saw its duties and rights over the territory it now owned. Bandekow, however, was in the Soviet occupation zone, and Moscow had very different ideas about how to dismantle the infrastructure of Nazi Germany – as well as what it wanted to do with its share of the former Reich.

Initially, at least, there was agreement between the Allies on the need to bring Hitler's surviving henchmen to justice. A four-power war crimes tribunal was established to put the National Socialist machine on trial; Göring, Jodl, Hess, von Ribbentrop and twenty other leaders of the National Socialist state were locked up in cells beneath the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg to await trial for crimes of war and crimes against humanity. Other than Hitler and Goebbels, the most notable absentee from this roll call of infamy was Himmler, creator of the SS and mastermind of the Nazi's apparatus of terror: after being captured he had committed suicide before he could be transported to Nuremberg.

The eventual trial and conviction of almost all these men was undoubtedly a triumph for justice, but it also marked the high point of cooperation between the occupying powers. After Nuremberg, America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union would each take a radically different approach to the land and populations they controlled: the individual fates of tens of millions of former Germans depended on which zone they happened to have been in when the war ended. Very soon these great political divides would change the lives of our little family for ever.

The contrast between the four occupying powers was played out first in the way they viewed Nazi Party members. Denazification was a phrase coined in Washington during the last years of war: President Franklin Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, recognised that the party's tendrils had wound themselves throughout every aspect of
German life, from the political to the judicial, the public to the personal. In May 1945 there were more than eight million members of the Nazi Party – around 10 per cent of the total population. What was to be done about this entwining of the mechanics of fascism with the warp and weft of everyday life?